Return of the Spirit

by Tawfiq al-Hakim

  One key religious section in Return of the Spirit is Muhsin’s vision in the cowshed, which seems almost a parody of Martin Luther’s revelation in the tower. In this cowshed, which is also the residence of a farm family, Muhsin comes to know the unity of existence and the unified duality of the emotions and logic. When his rival, Mustafa, succumbs to love and tries to decide whether to put his feelings into a letter to his beloved, he becomes a prime example of this notion of al-Hakim (and of others) that the heart and the mind actually reason in different ways. Both are trustworthy guides, no matter how much they appear to contradict each other on the surface. In his vision, Muhsin, by having a feeling of the unity of existence, has had a “feeling of God.” This could be another example of latent Sufism in al-Hakim’s writings, of a secular spiritualism, or of a secular Islamic pantheism, except that al-Hakim cites Dostoyevsky here, taking the passage from a book by Mérejkovsky.

  THE FAMILY AS A MICROCOSM OF EGYPT

  The novel’s characters, well developed in themselves, also stand for things that form part of the book’s meaning.

  Zanuba is criticized for shaving the food budget to spend money instead on magic and charlatans. The Islamic modernist message conveyed through this example is that uneducated women are not the fruit of Islam but a danger to it. Society, and particularly Islamic society, must protect itself by educating women thoroughly in every field.

  The scenes contrasting Saniya with her mother show generational change in the outlook of women in Egypt during that period. Saniya is even more strongly contrasted with Zanuba when Zanuba makes a determined effort to attract the attention of Mustafa, the man who will fall in love with Saniya. (Of course, everyone who encounters Saniya falls in love with her.) Saniya is not only beautiful; she is also the representative new woman. She is the second Prisca, the modern Prisca, in al-Hakim’s landmark play, The People of the Cave—which was published the same year as Return of the Spirit—because she is an educated woman. Both Saniya and her mother successfully manipulate the men in their lives, but Saniya has a turn of mind that is the fruit of her education and that allows her to debate with her mother and to guide her intended mate in an appropriate direction. The marriages of the mother and daughter are instructively different. Saniya’s father waited to marry until he had virtually completed his career—until he had made enough money to retire. Saniya marries, for love, a young man she has encountered by chance. Fortunately, money is not in short supply here either.

  Of all the characters, Saniya is the most heavily burdened by symbolism, although she is slow to understand her plight. She would be justified in protesting, as King Oedipus did in al-Hakim’s play of the same name, that what happened was the fault of other people casting their fantasies upon her. Saniya is Isis, or a representative of Isis. She is therefore a symbol for woman and for the Egyptian woman as goddess, or vice versa. She is also a symbol for the reawakened spirit of Egypt. Critics have complained that Saniya is not a strong enough character to bear the weight of all this symbolism.28 Without meeting her, without losing our hearts to her, can we believe in her? The symbol gap is, however, an important theme of al-Hakim’s works. In his play that is named for her, for example, Shahrazad pulls out all the stops in an attempt to save not herself but her husband from his obsession with her weighty symbolic baggage. Even Muhsin, in time, realizes that Saniya is less important as a person than as a symbol. Saniya at least has the courage to follow her own course. In this respect she resembles the heroine of E. M. Forster’s Howards End, who expressed her satisfaction with her spiritual compromises.29

  Mustafa Bey’s blond mustache and chestnut hair are not accidental details in Return of the Spirit. They suggest that he is partly of Turkish heritage—like Muhsin’s mother (and of course Muhsin too, thanks to his mother). Furthermore, his status is specified by his servant: “He’s one of the gentry.” Blond or not, Mustafa turns out to be a hero parallel to Muhsin. In fact, Return of the Spirit is full of heroes: the entire Egyptian population. Mustafa’s dilemma—whether to sell out to a foreign concern—looks forward to the industrialist-technocrat hero of al-Hakim’s play Tender Hands. In other words, Mustafa is the son of a true Egyptian businessman and has a duty to develop his father’s company and engage in nation building. He needs only Saniya’s encouragement to make this decision. Like Muhsin and his uncles, Mustafa is a sleeping beau awakened by the charming princess Saniya.

  Muhsin is a callow artist who aspires to become the voice of the people and thus a reformer. He shares in the popular revolution and suffers the consequences. In al-Hakim’s later works, such as the play Princess Sunshine, the artist’s role is limited to reforming the nation’s leaders, even, at times, from an ivory tower. Muhsin’s attitudes contrast strongly with those of his parents, who even comment on this. Muhsin shows us the right way. As our role model, he teaches us to shun narrow ethnic prejudice and snobbery and to throw our lot in with the masses. Muhsin is aware of the difference of status separating him from the farm laborers who work his parents’ estate, but the opulence of his parents’ house revolts him. Muhsin of course represents Tawfiq al-Hakim in this novel. Al-Hakim’s autobiography, The Prison of Life, portrays the child’s mother in a more flattering way.30 The novel’s account is, possibly, the franker version.

  The drowsiness of Hanafi, the honorary head of the household, reaches a climax at the end of the first volume when Muhsin misses his train because Hanafi was napping on a bench at the station. This personality trait, which helps define Hanafi’s character, is also symbolic, for this novel is all about awakening Egypt.

  Two of the weaker characters—the French archaeologist and the British irrigation inspector—are also two of the more transparent symbols. Their identification by nationality and specialization is hardly accidental. That an Anglo-French team should be entertained at the beginning of the twentieth century in a Turkish/Ottoman fashion on an Egyptian farm is historically accurate. The division of labor speaks to a paradox of the early twentieth century in Egypt: Great Britain exercised a commanding political and military presence, but France was important culturally. Al-Hakim himself went to France to further his legal studies. Although a digression, the scene between the Englishman and the Frenchman serves to bring out ideas that tie up loose ends of the plot. The French archaeologist’s views, a major element in this character’s portrayal, were inspired by the Russian author Mérejkovsky’s book Les Mystères de l’Orient. This book obviously influenced al-Hakim—there are repeated quotations from it and allusions to it in Return of the Spirit—but the ideas he borrowed from it were not given to Muhsin and may be taken with a grain of salt.31

  Dr. Hilmi, Saniya’s army doctor father, plays a part in the plot, but serves mainly to introduce a digression about the Sudan. The question of the political status and future of that land riled Egyptian-British relations for decades. With the anecdotes of life in the Sudan toward the end of the first volume, al-Hakim made a series of nationalist, Egyptian points about the possibilities of future Egyptian exploitation of that country’s resources. These adventure stories told by the retired doctor outside the pharmacy also provide an example of Egyptian society’s separation at the time into two gender worlds: one of men literally in the street and a second of women praying or playing the piano inside the house.

  The unsuccessful attempt of Muhsin’s blended family to hand over the household finances to Mabruk conveys a political message. Mabruk, although male, is uneducated and illiterate. When he squanders “public” resources on personal prestige he violates the book’s teachings, which strongly favor solidarity. He also provides a warning against handing power over to uneducated masses who may squander the nation’s resources on prestige projects. There is thus an ambiguity to the political message, a fact that did not escape some Soviet critics.32 The novel’s waves flow back and forth between liberalism and authoritarianism.

  The respect that Return of the Spirit shows for the Egyptian nationalist lea
der Sa‘d Zaghlul, whose banishment led to the 1919 revolution, makes Zaghlul seem the Prince Charming whose kiss will awaken the Sleeping Beauty—Egypt. The novel implies that this Prince Charming could be another pharaoh and even an earthly manifestation of the divine. Al-Hakim later realized that this beautiful, romantic vision had less beautiful implications for human rights and freedoms. Even though the book’s prediction that this new leader would bring forth from the Egyptian people another miracle like the pyramids appeared to set the stage for President Nasser’s successful struggle to build the Aswan High Dam, it is not Sa‘d Zaghlul who figures in the climax of the novel. Muhsin, the young man who aspires to be an artist expressing the feelings of his people, is the novel’s hero. Moreover, Muhsin does not wish to become the nation’s beloved, simply its tongue or mouthpiece. In al-Hakim’s world, the artist inspires the politician. Return of the Spirit is a call not to arms, but to pens.

  ASSESSMENTS

  The strongest claim that Return of the Spirit makes for the attention of a non-Egyptian reader is its realistic depiction of life in Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century. Roger Allen, in The Arabic Novel, termed it “the first novel which succeeded in giving a totally convincing portrait of a family.”33 Ali Jad wrote, “This is a novel about Egypt par excellence: here we find Egypt not only in the . . . daily life . . . of Muhsin and his uncles and aunt . . . but also in the crowded streets, coffee houses, tramcars and trains, in wedding parties and classrooms, at demonstrations and in prison.”34

  Ali Jad underscored the novel’s comedy, reminding the reader of al-Hakim’s early training in the Egyptian popular theater, in which vaudeville, slapstick, and farce were combined with music. Jad mentioned the book’s “comedy engendered by the opposition of his characters’ personalities and . . . conflicting interests” and “a series of outrageous . . . actions . . . followed by [a] hilarious comment.” If “the characters in [Return of the Spirit] do not exactly go about throwing custard pies at each other. . . . Zannubah helped by a reluctant Mabruk bombards the two lovers (Saniyyah and Mustafa) with . . . garbage.” Jad suggested that “the novel could readily be made into a musical farce.”35

  The Egyptian critic Hamdi Sakkut called Return of the Spirit “the first Egyptian novel which can sustain comparison with Western works.”36 He also commented that its popularity “helped to raise the prestige of the Egyptian novel.”37 Sasson Somekh said that the novel’s dialogue, “given in vigorous vernacular—is probably among the best in Egyptian fiction.”38

  Richard Long said that Return of the Spirit “is by general consent the first real novel in Arabic.” If that were not enough, he pointed out, “The first real play and the first real novel in Arabic, astonishingly, had issued from one pen, seven months apart in the same year.”39 He was, of course, talking about their publication dates, not the actual period of composition.

  Ali Jad mentioned al-Hakim’s “consistent characterization” as one of the novel’s strengths: “Almost everything the characters do reflects and confirms the author’s initial statements about them.”40 As is typical in al-Hakim’s works, the language of the novel is clear and unpretentious. The noted Egyptian author Yahya Haqqi commented, “Return of the Spirit is written in the only style that can be considered suitable to the theme: an easy, uncomplicated, authentic style that conveys conversation through its spirit and describes and speaks in such a way that the readers, about and for whom it was written, can understand it.” Haqqi continued by saying al-Hakim’s “only aim is to be entirely natural, unforced, and unpretentious.”41 In this book al-Hakim used more dialect words than he would later, even some words said to be used only between women.

  A nice touch of irony is provided by the fact that Muhsin and Zanuba inadvertently awaken and foster the romance between Saniya and Mustafa, even though this romance runs counter to the hopes and wishes of their entire family. An apparent structural problem—that the novel starts as a romance starring Muhsin and Saniya but ends up with a different male lead—may exist only in the reader’s mind. One can argue that a single romantic event is seen in radically different ways by the various characters, whose differing perspectives merely give the story the appearance of being a series of unrelated romances.

  Ghali Shukri found a creative tension in Return of the Spirit involving (a) its classical dramatic structure, in which the characters’ development is determined by their symbolic roles and by a progression from beginning to crisis to resolution, (b) a middle-class romantic ideology, and finally (c) realism, which is received here more hospitably than previously in Egyptian literature. What is really at stake in the novel is not a classical theme like honor or revenge, or a romantic one like death, but the condition of the middle classes in Egypt at the start of the twentieth century.42 Each of the novel’s characters has a role to play by personifying this cause and milieu. Countless details that taken separately may seem of trivial importance are woven together to create a realistic fabric for the novel. According to Shukri, al-Hakim’s blend of classical dramatic structure, bourgeois romanticism, and realism influenced Naguib Mahfouz (especially in Palace Walk) as well as other Egyptian writers.43

  Some critics, admittedly, prefer Maze of Justice, which Roger Allen has called “a beautifully constructed picture of the Egyptian countryside.”44 Dina Amin, for example, in an extensive article about al-Hakim, praised Maze of Justice as “one of his finest prose works” and said of Return of the Spirit only that it was “reality-based” and “a fictional portrayal of the life of his paternal uncles and aunt in Cairo, with whom he lodged while completing his undergraduate education.”45

  For reasons that I have advanced in this introduction and elsewhere, however, I believe that Return of the Spirit is Tawfiq al-Hakim’s single most influential and important novel, if only for the juicy slice of Egyptian life it offers. Roger Allen admitted that it “provides a lively colloquial dialogue as a means of introducing his readers to the tensions of a large Egyptian family . . . in Egypt in 1919.”46 Paul Starkey acknowledged that because it “captured the mood of the Egyptian people at a crucial point in their history,” it “may well strike a more responsive note in the mind of the average Egyptian reader” than Maze of Justice, which combined “realism and immediacy” with an “avoidance of the structural faults [that] mar all his other extended prose works.”47

  M. M. Badawi wrote an excellent assessment of the novel: “Return of the Spirit represents a giant step forward in the writing of the Arabic novel: the art of narration, the skill in characterization, and chiefly the management of dialogue, in which al-Hakim boldly opted for the language of speech rather than that of writing. Furthermore, the work is characterized by al-Hakim’s intelligence and urbanity of spirit, as well as the ability to see and create comic situations in which humour is often combined with pathos.”48

  CONCLUSION

  Return of the Spirit is first and foremost a memorable and influential portrait of an Egyptian Muslim family living a century ago. The message of the novel is upbeat; it teaches that the solidarity of Egyptians of all walks of life will revive the age-old Egyptian spirit and chase away colonial oppressors, whose chief damage has been psychological and can be addressed, first and foremost, by waking the Egyptian people. The only true villains in the novel are inertia and ignorance. Return of the Spirit did not merely celebrate the change that Tawfiq al-Hakim felt began in Egypt in 1919 but was itself a significant part of that change.

  WILLIAM MAYNARD HUTCHINS

  NOTES

  1. Alaa Al Aswany, “Narrating the Revolution,” interview in the Cairo Review of Global Affairs 1 (Spring 2011), 91–92.

  2. Ghali Shukri, Thawrat al-Mu‘tazil (Beirut: Dar al-Afaq al-Jadida, n.d.), 142.

  3. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 189.

  4. Ibid., 252–53.

  5. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. Victor Lan
ge (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1949), “May 22,” 8–9.

  6. Ibid., “June 21,” 24; “March 15, 1772,” 68–69; “September 4, 1772,” 79.

  7. Ibid., “August 18,” 48–49; “May 10, 1771,” 3.

  8. Ibid., “Introduction,” by Victor Lange, ix, x.

  9. Jean Lacouture, Nasser: A Biography, trans. Daniel Hofstadter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 28, 281; P. J. Vatikiotis, Nasser and His Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 28, 29, 43; Amos Elon, Flight into Egypt (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1981), 103, 159; Anouar Abdel-Malek, Egypt: Military Society, trans. Charles Markmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 207–208; and Richard Long, Tawfiq al Hakim: Playwright of Egypt (London: Ithaca Press, 1979), 28.